Until 2017, Herbalife published statements of average gross compensation that covered an entire year. Like all other MLMs, they provided selected information that ended up being misleading in various ways, but ultimately it still showed a pretty dismal picture and showed that few people made much money as a distributor.

“In a typical month from June to September 2017, about 45,000 U.S. Distributors ordered products for resale from Herbalife and about 40,000 of them earned money from their sales and the sales of those they sponsored. Here is what they earned in a typical month, before expenses.”

Do you see the fancy footwork? Herbalife just ignored 170,000 distributors. Those distributors apparently ordered no products and made no money, so Herbalife pretended they didn’t exist. By pretending they don’t exist, the numbers look much better. 15,000 of distributors earned more than $305. That’s 33% of the 45,000 distributors they want us to pay attention to (not so bad), but it’s only 7% of the 215,000 total distributors who actually exist.

Oops! I guess Herbalife wasn’t all that interested in providing full disclosure like they promised the FTC they were going to do. Who could have predicted that????